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dryriver (1010635) writes in with news that the Chinese government has had enough of the antics of doctor Sheldon Lee Cooper. "Chinese authorities have ordered video streaming websites in the country to stop showing four popular American TV shows, including The Big Bang Theory and The Good Wife, senior staff from two sites said Sunday. The move suggests government attention is intensifying on the online streaming industry, which is freer than state television and China's cinemas to show foreign productions and other content and has stretched the boundaries of what can be seen in the country. A spokeswoman for a leading online video site, Youku, said it had received notification on Saturday not to show sitcom The Big Bang Theory, political and legal drama The Good Wife, crime drama NCIS and legal drama The Practice."

Fortunately it's not an ABC show, because I would be blocked from watching back episodes in the US because my cable provider is not one of the handful of cats and dogs in the network's "verify to watch" list.

Please explain to me what is or has been on TV, that is actually smart TV?Almost all public media that lasts more then one season (TV/Comic Books/Radio/Popular Blogs...) in general are made so someone with an 8th grade education will be able to get it. That is where the money is in. And if you get too much past that then viewers will drop.

Why 8th grade? Well that marks an end of a students general education and they begin specializing. Some kids take more electives in the Math and Sciences, others toward

I could mention a few things that I've enjoyed, but for every show there's a crowd that'll deem it too crass, too silly, or not smart enough; and then there are those who simply enjoy lamenting the state of things.

Anyway, there's dumb, dumber and dumberer. There's something to be said against a show that can be recognized at a distance by the train of canned laughter pulses (yes I know, "filmed in front of a live audience", just like your gummy candy is "made with real fruit").

Excellent movie, but it was missing almost all references to the banking system and TARP funds. For example, the entire scene at the end, where Derek Jeter hands them documents regarding banking fraud (their "next case"), was cut. The info graphics credits sequence omitted everything but the Ponzi scheme part (but it wasn't just cut off after that; the credits continued with the part after the info graphics). You can view the sequence on Youtube, but that's not complete either: It's missing the AIG and TARP

American companies stream movies to China.But they don't do the same thing to Europe (Game of Thrones as an example).How is that even billed? And now we have an uproar that China is censoring it.Wow... I would like to have an uproar that we are forced to pirate movies because they get published here (in Europe) months if not years after they were made...I'm fed up with movies/books being available in Europe months or years after they where made, for what ever reason...

Ultimately piracy is a delivery problem, not a legal one. Here in Australia if I want to watch Game of Thrones I need to pay Murdoch A$70+ a month and have to do it on Murdoch's time table. Both of these are unacceptable to me. So downloading it is the only acceptable option remaining.

The old system used by HBO and Murdoch's Foxtel is dying a slow death. People dont want to wait for shows to be on, they want to watch them at their own leisure nor do they want to have to pay for 30 channels of bullshit to get 1 show. Piracy isn't a scourge on humanity as Murdoch et al. would like to perpetuate, it's merely the market reacting to conditions they find unacceptable. If you want to see piracy of your show plummet, make it available through as many channels as possible for a reasonable price. The easiest way to do this is to allow anyone to resell it for a flat (per copy) license fee that people will accept.

However they want to continue to prop up outdated ideas like exclusivity. So they will have to accept that piracy is an acceptable alternative.

Dont kid yourself, when people find terms unreasonable, casual copying becomes justifiable.
Ultimately piracy is a delivery problem, not a legal one. Here in Australia if I want to watch Game of Thrones

Note that your key word here is "want".. not "need". And what people find unreasonable is certainly a subjective decision which will vary with individual and circumstance, and therefore falls anywhere from meaningful to meaningless. It is deemed justifiable only if you feel you are somehow entitled to the content they created and distribute.
I just wait for GoT to come out on BluRay, and buy it for $35 on amazon.com. Granted I'm a year behind this way, but I'm not paying for the extravagance that is H

I think you forgot the option of simply not watching the content. We are not talking about essential human needs here but entertainment.

Wrong.

Speaking as someone who was raised without a television, I can tell you it's about far more than entertainment. It's about culture. If you are not exposed to the same entertainment as the people around you, you are not part of the culture. And that's incredibly harmful. Yeah, it gives you a different perspective from everyone else, but guess what: despite all PBS propaganda to the contrary, differing perspectives are not appreciated. They are barely tolerated, and in a lot of places, not even tha

Yes, there's no "need" to pirate per se. But in several cases getting that content legitimately, in Europe, is close to impossible. We are not talking just "delayed release" as the parent poster said, we are also talking about stuff that never, ever, is released commercially in Europe or regions of Europe for whatever reason. Not to mention some European countries like Spain do everything in their power to prevent you from legally purchasing products from other regions, or at least make it much more expensive than it should.

This is different as don't wanting to play by their terms, this is literally having no terms to play with in several cases. And I understand his sentiment, it's a big deal when China can't have those, but when Europe doesn't have US-produced content, shows or articles, nobody gives a damn and we even get called out on pirating stuff we can't purchase without being rich. Please.

Maybe that doesn't bug you, but it's a thing that happens, believe it or not.

The content is "advertised" (usually officially) and not available for purchase, at any price. They are enticing you to watch it, then refusing to make it available. That's "forcing" someone to pirate it. Their terms are simple. "you can't have it" but they still suggest and advertise it.

Copyright is a legal right to monopoly on the distribution of certain media (intellectual property). If they choose to advertise but not release then they are within their legal rights, and those that infringe copyright are disrespecting these rights.

Don't get me wrong, I believe that copyright law itself is unethical, but under no circumstances does your scenario "force" people to infringe copyright. If you don't like the effective censorship, then resist copyright in it's totality rather than being a hy

Certainly you aren't forced to pirate it per se, but you can feel compelled to.
When I try to access HBO GO I can read this: To access HBO GO, you must reside within the fifty states of the United States of America.
If you reside in this area and are still experiencing difficulties, please contact your television provider.
So I use proxies to 'bend' the rules. HBO does get money from me but technically I committed tax fraud and violated local licences. This almost equals pirating it since the local licens

Yes, we are forced to pirate. A fair and reasoning sense of fairness applies with regard to all of the times we have been lied to about the quality of content and have been sucked into paying for shit. That sense of fairness demands that in response to being repeatedly defrauded as regards to the quality of the content being sold, we endeavour to recover non-refundable capital and also to ensure we are not again cheated in the future, we fully test out content prior to paying for it. If the content is suff

Ofc I'm forced to pirate it.GoT is not aired in germany when it is in USA. Nor is it available on DVD. And HBO is not streaming into germany either. So either I have to wait another year or ask a friend from the USA to give me a copy (which is strictly speaking not piracy and in fact legal, at least in germany).

But they don't do the same thing to Europe (Game of Thrones as an example).

Huh. I guess that I get HBO Nordic (with full HBO backlog, excluding sadly Deadwood and Oz due to some ownership issues) and recent episodes the next day they're broadcast in the US with local subtitles on my smart-ish TV was just a dream. Oh wait, it wasn't, GoT day today.

tv.sohu.com, though, is a legal streaming site and TBBT has been pulled from their, but 2BG (Two Broke Girls) is still available. I would think that this is a mind-boggingly bad decision, except I do meet people in China that feel they need to ask if women really do have Sex in the City, and if there really are so many murders every day in the USA to justify all the police dramas. Yet most of them can recognize that the Chinese war dramas may not be the best way of learning World War II history.

Whereas America has an average of 18 minutes of commercials per hour, whereas (the UK, at least) has an average of 12.

Also in the case of the UK, it's been a long while since we only had 4 channels on the dial. We've had 5 since 1997, we've had subscription satellite TV since 1990, we now have digital TV (in terrestrial radio broadcast, satellite, and cable formats).

Just the BBC, our "TV License" payee, has 9 television channels (most of them in HD), 10 national radio stations, a multitude of local stations

Sigh. Roughly 40 free to air channels, not including shopping, subscription or timeshifted, on UK TV. Nine BBC channels, variable quality (fair to excellent), but easily superior to any other main English-speaking nation in the world, and I've been to them all for periods > a month (plenty of time to absorb the shock).

That and the ad-free radio (bliss) on seven excellent channels [pop, easy-listening, classical, news/drama/factual, talk/sport, music, repeats of drama from over 60 years of archives] plus

The shows themselves may not be objectionable, keep in mind. It may be payback or threat for other things, movies or something. In Iron Man 3, it's probable The Mandarin was converted from an evil actual Chinese guy to a lame cover story so as to not offend lest that and future movies be banned...or taxed extra hard.

Meh, I dunno, NCIS is pretty obvious US propaganda, although probably more aimed at aligning the views of americans to the will of the powers that be. Big bang theory, no idea why they decided to ban this. The two other shows, I dunno, never watched them but legal dramas tend to paint lawyers and cops as honest people with high standards for thruth and justice, some sort of idealised version of how america could be if it wasn't all corrupt, so I can see some propaganda value there.

One is compelled to wonder what the aversion to the show is that I see so prevalently on slashdot. Rr is the antipathy based on a sentiment that seems generally opposed to anything that might be categorized as pop culture... a notion that in my observation seems most prevalent among nerds in the under-30 crowd.

For myself, I like the show... my wife introduced me to it in what I would discover was season 3, and she now routinely mentions to me that my "Sheldon is showing" whenever I start acting like a dick without really meaning to.

One is that they do a pretty good job portraying various kinds of geeks. Since it is a comedy it makes light of unflattering and silly characteristics that those geeks have. Well, many people can't laugh at themselves. Real life Sheldon Coopers can't laugh at themselves any more than the character can, and thus the character would be something they don't like.

Another is jealousy. The characters on the show have generally had a good deal of success in love, despite being geeky, with very pretty women. This is something that many of the real life geeks on Slashdot do not share. Hence, there is jealousy of the characters.

Finally there is the hipster-ish anti-pop culture thing. That somehow, if something is popular, it can't be good. For many geek, part of the identity is being an outcast, being different, and liking different things. So liking something mainstream won't do at all for them, not because they don't actually like it but because it would conflict with their self identity.

Personally, I think it is hilarious. Not quite as good as the IT Crowd, but I enjoy it and it makes me laugh regularly. Being that it is a comedy, that is all I can ask:).

I have watched a fair amount of The Big Bang Theory, but something I read put most clearly into words what bothered me about it: The Big Bang Theory's jokes are very often about humiliating its characters for being geeks/nerds. On the other hand, see Community, which, while it also makes fun of its characters, it lets them have geeky interests without making fun of them for it. The other not-funny-ness in The Big Theory is pretty much normal for sitcoms (e.g. the laugh track other comments are complaining a

Absolutely.The poke in the eye is that when you hear about the show your first thought might be that finally, here's a show on TV that's actually taking note of who you are. Finally something on TV not dumbed down? Could this be like discovering 2am Open University programmes?? Another Monty Python?!

Then you watch it... and as the bad laugh track comes in your heart sinks as you realise it's just another bad sitcom.

It's the most popular show at work other than Game of Thrones. Sheldon is alr

I watched a single episode of The Big Bang Theory. It was about a "Magic the Gathering"-esque contest between Will Wheaton (as himself) and Horrible Geek Guy (Sheldon?). It was obvious that none of the writers on the show had the faintest idea about how Collectible Card Games worked, just knew they were something competitive that gross nerds did. Seriously, the portrayal of a CCG was embarrassingly bad, kind of like that CSI Miami episode about Grand Theft Auto. (I'll admit, it didn't posit any theories

Actually, the reason I don't like BBT is that especially in the last few seasons, it's basically gotten mean. Penny calls the geeks losers, the geeks call Penny a loser, no one actually achieves anything, the geeky side of things is mostly there to get laughs on the basis of "look how anti-social and inept they are".

So in short, it's not really geeky anymore, the humor is basically about insulting everyone right and left, and the people are basically flat stereotypes.

One is that they do a pretty good job portraying various kinds of geeks. Since it is a comedy it makes light of unflattering and silly characteristics that those geeks have.

I have more than enough in common in my real with the character of Sheldon to be regularly compared to him in real life.... not only by my wife, but by other people who know me and also watch the show. At my last job, I had been there for only four days before somebody asked me if I watched BBT, saying that I reminded him a lot of Shel

For myself, the real turn-off has been that this show has become the defining cultural reference for nerd-dom. That is, when I talk about something nerdy, mention that my background is in physics, or do some socially inept thing that reveals my nerd-hood, there's a very good chance that someone will bring up tBBT, either comparing me to Sheldon, or comparing the thing I'm talking about to an episode of the show.

Really, I don't think there's anything wrong with the show - it is just annoying how much it d

A big source of my aversion is that they are actors pretending to be geeks

You know what? I think that's the first objection to the show that I've seen which makes sense. And it's true... Parsons, Galecki, Helberg... Nayyar... none of them are particular geeky or nerdy. Ironically, of the original cast, Cuocco is probably the nerdiest of the bunch, and I wouldn't rank her as being that nerdy except in relation to those other four. Of the current cast, however, Mayim Bialik probably gives the show the m

I wish Australia would ban these shows too, then maybe the free-to-air stations might have to get off their lazy arses and make some decent home-grown shows instead. It's no wonder the commercial channels are dying out here - lazy content, too many adverts far too often, horrible cheap-and-nasty titling graphics, constant pop-ups. It's unwatchable. They don't get it, and the sooner they die the better. Or they could, you know, improve.

I suspect it's more like a form of protectionism. They can't slap some serious tariffs due to WTO or whatever. So in order to protect fledgling local production they do a form of bang-bang control: now you can watch that and now you can't.

I'd agree that it is protectionism, but more from brain drain. It shows eccentric scientists living happily and somewhat successfully in the US. One of the main characters is of Indian descent and there are often several other Asian scientists shown in the university lunchroom.

I keep thinking that Big Bang Theory is the prevailing cosmological model for the early development of the universe. The key idea is that the universe is expanding. The Big Bang model suggests that at some moment all matter in the universe was contained in a single point, which is considered the beginning of the universe. Modern measurements place this moment at approximately 13.82 billion years ago, which is thus considered the age of the universe.

tBBT is quite rude in places. A repeated episode I saw last week had Penny suggesting that she was picked up by a guy in a bar, who then picked up another girl and they went off to have a threesome. Or Sheldon worrying Leonard about Penny being hypnotised by a male friend to 'make her think she's a chicken pecking seed' (moving his head back and forward). If you listen carefully, there are a lot of pretty close-to-the-knuckle lines like this.

I dunno why China would want to censor NCIS. It depicts an armed federal agency violating the law and the Constitution with astonishing regularity and effectively with impunity (the Season 10 cliffhanger ending notwithstanding). From illegal wiretaps to illegal tracking to outright extrajudicial killings, it makes a mockery of law and order in the US. The Chinese government should be delighted.

Authoritarian governments often see the political in what we consider the mundane. They are often wary of allowing "Western" or "bourgeois" ideas to "corrupt" the masses under their control. Even literature or art from their own society can be banned. Consider the example of Doctor Zhivago:

Sheldon suffers from the same ailment as Greg House MD. Insufferable Tool Syndrome.

True but the difference is that Greg House is portrayed as a highly intelligent bastard whereas, in the one episode of BBT I managed to watch, Sheldon was played as an unintelligent idiot who would not last 10 seconds as a grad student.

China is much more concerned about "cultural contamination", not just political contamination. While the Chinese are Communists, they are not the hyper-political communists of the Soviet Union where culture such as religion and traditions were a plague to be eradicated, they are Communists with an eye towards preserving their very ancient culture.

tBBT shows enough pure unadulterated American freedom that is in conflict with sanitized state controlled media.China isn't the only country whose govts are pissed with pure uncensored internet freedom. Even my Brazil "democracy" has tried to police twitter, facebook, google plus to censure critics of politicians specially right before elections. Remember Turkey has banned twitter and facebook.Realize that without serious state controlled media, China will fracture into dozens of states. It's internal language, cultural and social disparities rival only the former USSR.China invented the technique of legalism back in (259 BC – 210 BC) when "China Qin Shi Huang" gave his name to his country, in the past having even censured attempts to use history against current rulers.

Someone should have suggested to the emperor that he could actually name the whole country after himself. I imagine he would have been very pleased. Of course, he would have had to come up with a name that wasn't based on Indo-European languages. Maybe a cursory look at Wikipedia on the etymology of China is in order.

When it comes to language disparities, I think India at least equals China with its hundreds of languages and cultures. And manages to be relatively democratic, if highly flawed and still prone to some censorship.

Perhaps China could become a democracy and stay a single country. I hope it could.But for as long as it's a dictatorship, I have less than zero respect for that country. Same for Cuba, North Korea, Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and many other de facto dictatorships like Russia,Venezuela,Equador. Oh the curse of having lots of Oil.

I live in Brazil. Brazil is a democracy, since we can vote, and we can criticize anybody without fear of being arrested or singled out by the govt.Perhaps you should understand the basic pillars of a true democracy: 1 - Freedom of the press
2 - Freedom of peaceful assembly
3 - Freedom of expression
4 - Right to private property
5 - Right to a fair trialMany countries are controlled by a fairly small political elite, but are subject to the 5 above rules, even though the pol

IIRC they did an episode where Chinese researchers apparently faked scientific results synthesizing a super heavy element. In episode before that said Chinese researchers claimed that this discovery was the greatest thing besides of the communist party, and one of the main characters of the show said that the communist party made them say that.

The Big Bang Theory is hugely popular among young people in China. It's one of the most famous American TV shows there, and it is (was) very widely circulated. There are many jokes they don't really "get," but they still really like it.

To be honest, the episodes that I have watched made me feel a little insulted. I've no idea what sort of creds the writers have, but I got the impression that it was a show that parodied "geeks" made by people who have no idea what the word actually means.

Now, on the other hand, "did you try turning it off and on again?" is something that certainly rings common to me.

Considering Mayim Bialik is an actual neuroscientist and several of the consultants for the show are physicists, the creds of the writers are very well established.

Don't forget Danica McKellar who showed up for an episode, with her degree in mathematics (sum cum laude). Stephen Hawking, Brian Greene and Neil Degrasse Tyson have also appeared with Hawking lending his electronic voice to a handful of episodes as well.

Well, we've got a truckload of butthurt nerds here apparently, who can't just relax and enjoy a funny show and laugh a little at themselves, or at least, their stereotypes, and recognize them for just that.
Why so serious? I've seen these arguments here before. Leonard's asthma/inhaler are bit over the top and cliched, granted, but it's just a show. I don't go to comic book stores or buy Batman or Star Wars figurines, and never did, but I know some geeky types who do that.
Another demographic joins the "

It's maybe becoming more like the TV show "Friends" with everybody in a relationship. It is remarkable the writers can come up with an interesting new script every week considering the show is in its Seventh season.

It wasn't 'banned' as the AC hysterically claimed, it was rejected. Follow the link a sentence or two further, it was picked up by ITV, as stated.

Banning means stopping it being broadcast. They couldn't and didn't do this. The next sentence in your link explains why they didn't pay money to the US for a children's programme, as they were quite happily making British pre-school television, without the letter Zee.